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The invention disclosed herein relates generally to systems and methods that allow for control of the flow of and access to information. More particularly, the invention relates to a system for information processing, delivery, and access with applications to information in electronic format.
While access to electronically stored information has increased drastically with the use of computers and, specifically, global computer networks such as the Internet, the cost of information access is often dominated not by the cost of the information itself or of the gathering or digitization of the information, but by the time required to sort out and evaluate data relevant to a given query. This is particularly apparent for real-time event-driven information and content. Such information includes news, notifications, advisements, announcements, commentary, press releases, message postings to Internet-based newsgroups (such as via Usenet), data in discussion groups and chat boards, as well as information generated by product searches, job searches, consulting searches, matchmaking, and networking. Often, the cost of sorting and evaluating information is too great to justify the search, resulting in an overload of information.
One existing approach to reduce the flow of information is collaborative filtering. Such filtering allows profiled users to express interest in content. The system then records the interest level and uses it to predict the interest of other users based on the similarity of their respective profiles. This approach is inappropriate for accessing and directing time-sensitive information as it is inherently not a real-time method. Further, entities employing this approach can offer users no more expertise in directing the flow of information than as determined by a group of peers, with the peers possibly having no more expertise than a given user. A related existing method, learning-by-action, is another approach that is ineffective in real-time environments.
Another existing method is known as xe2x80x9ckeyword matchingxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9ctextual searches.xe2x80x9dKeyword matching suffers from the problem that matches are not context specific. That is, there is no efficient way to match words based on their meaning. An additional problem is that there is no uniformity of keywords. Further, xe2x80x9cstructured informationxe2x80x9d content is not utilized by this method of searching for information.
Thus there is a need for a system and method for efficiently sorting and sifting through a large information flow.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for efficiently sorting through a large information flow.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a system and method for employing an intuitive, rule-based approach to allow information originators to more intelligently distribute their information and to allow end-users to leverage their own expertise and domain specific knowledge.
Some of the above and other objects of the present invention are achieved by a method and system for distributing information between an originator and at least one end-user. According to the invention, the originator generates a message rule for indicating types of end-users that are eligible to receive the information. An end-user generates a profile rule for indicating types of information and types of originators that the end-user would be interested in receiving the information from. Further, an administrator generates a system rule for indicating what types of information from what types of originators should be delivered to what types of end-users. Then, at least one end-user is identified that is eligible and interested to receive the information on the basis of the generated message, profile and system rules. And the information is delivered to the identified at least one end-user.
According to one aspect of the present invention, the identity of the end-user is not disclosed to the originator. According to another aspect of the present invention, the generated message, profile and system rules are specified by an autonomous agent.